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Deeplinks Blog

Deeplinks Blog

Tumblr's artificial intelligence filter is blocking lots of false positives and removing beneficial content. What's missing is the balance that human judgment brings. Is this a sign of things to come across all social media platforms, or all Internet content in general? Kurt Opsahl, Erica Portnoy, Jairus Khan (Moderator), James...

People don't go into public policy because they want to be billionaires; they go into public policy because they care and want to make a difference. How does one get started making contributions in this area, and can it really be turned into a financially sustaining career path? Andrew Greenberg...

Facial recognition is becoming ubiquitous in commercial, government, and law enforcement applications, but is well known to identify women and minorities less accurately. Why is this, and what are the risks to individual liberty from mis-identification? Erica Portnoy, Jairus Khan (Moderator), Hayley Tsukayama

Australia's push to require backdoors in all mobile devices is just the beginning of a nightmarish scenario for civil rights and civil liberties in that country. What is really going on down under, and has Australia given up on basic principles of democracy? Kurt Opsahl, Amie Stepanovich, K`Tetch (Moderator)

The CCPA becomes effective on January 1, 2020. What does it do, and how will it affect privacy rights in other states outside of California? Is this a good model for the whole country? Erica Portnoy, Ron Daniels, Hayley Tsukayama (Moderator)

So-called "Internet of Things" devices are infamous for having poor or non- existent security. Is it time for the government to start legislating security requirements? Has the free market failed to respond or create demand for "security as a feature"? Kurt Opsahl (Modertor), Erica Portnoy, Nathan White, Xavier Ashe

There's a growing effort to promote science, technology, engineering, and math for women and minorities in what have always been male and white dominated fields. What can we do to help, and are we putting too much pressure on girls and children of color to fulfill our own aspirations for...

Biometric surveillance by companies against consumers is a growing menace to our privacy, freedom of expression, and civil rights. Fortunately, a federal appeals court has ruled that a lawsuit against Facebook for its face surveillance may move forward. The decision, by the federal Ninth Circuit about an Illinois...

Doors across the United States are now fitted with Amazon’s Ring, a combination doorbell-security camera that records and transmits video straight to users’ phones, to Amazon’s cloud—and often to the local police department. By sending photos and alerts every time the camera detects motion or someone rings the doorbell, the...

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit last week became the first federal appellate court to rule that Section 230 bars civil terrorism claims against a social media company. The plaintiffs, who were victims of Hamas terrorist attacks in Israel, argued that Facebook should be liable...

With so much dissatisfaction over how companies like Facebook and YouTube moderate user speech, you might think that the groups that run the Internet’s infrastructure would want to stay far away from the speech-policing business. Sadly, two groups that control an important piece of the Internet’s infrastructure have decided to...

San Francisco – A team from the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has returned from a fact-finding mission in Quito for the case of Ola Bini—a globally renowned Swedish programmer who is facing tenuous computer-crime charges in Ecuador. Bini was detained in April, as he left his home in Quito to...

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and one of its component agencies, U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), released a Privacy Impact Assessment [.pdf] on CBP’s practice of monitoring social media to enhance the agency’s “situational awareness.” As we’ve argued in relation to other government social media surveillance...